Chasing Shackleton — Re-creating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival
Episode Stats
Summary
If you ve ever read the classic book Endurance, you ve probably shivered and shuddered as you wondered what it would have been like to have undertaken ernest Shackleton s famously arduous antarctic rescue mission. The adventurer Tim Jarvis did more than wonder when alexander Shackleton challenged him to recreate her grandfather's epic journey, he jumped at the chance to follow in the legendary explorer s footsteps.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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if you've ever read the classic book endurance you probably shivered and shuddered as you
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wondered what it would have been like to have undertaken ernest shackleton's famously arduous
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antarctic rescue mission the adventurer tim jarvis did more than wonder when alexander
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shackleton challenged him to recreate her grandfather's epic journey he jumped at the
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chance to follow in the legendary explorer's footsteps today in the show tim the author of
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chasing shackleton recreating the world's greatest journey of survival first shares the story of
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shackleton's heroic effort to save the crew of his failed antarctic expedition tim then tells us how
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he and his own crew replicated shackleton's journey over land and sea from taking the same kind of
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rowboat to eating the same kind of rations and the lessons and resilience and leadership he learned
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along the way after the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is slash shackleton
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all right tim jarvis welcome to the show thanks for having me so you are an explorer and adventurer and
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in 2013 you did an expedition in which you recreated ernest shackleton's famous rescue mission in the
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antarctic i'm sure a lot of people have read that famous book endurance um we're going to talk about
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that adventure today but before we do let's talk about your background how did you get started with
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exploring the antarctic well look i mean i've always explored things ever since i was a kid i grew up in
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malaysia as a young child my parents used to just send me outside and tell me to go and find things to
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do and that stayed with me all through all through childhood all the way into adulthood and the
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expeditions just got bigger and bigger and i think once you've spent a bit of time in your own
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company and and being that version of yourself you feel most like yourself when you're in those places
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so i've just kept on going and i guess the the ultimate conclusion is to end up doing shackleton's
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journey before you did shackleton's expedition you recreated the douglas mosson expedition for those who
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aren't familiar with that expedition what was it and where did you get this idea to replicate it
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yeah look i mean i've done lots of expeditions in the modern way but i've done two the old way
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mawson and shackleton and mawson was an australian scientist he was a contemporary of shackleton
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um he'd gone on an expedition with two colleagues to chart an uncharted section of antarctic coastline
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and essentially the first guy about 350 miles out from base fell in a crevasse he went down the hole
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with the dog team and the sled that contained about 80 percent of the food for the three men so once he
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was gone mawson and the surviving guy were left with a essentially a 330 340 mile return trip back
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to base with only about 20 percent of the food they needed to survive the second man died halfway home
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in mawson's arms of what he described at the time as fever but it could well have been it could have
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anything could have been malnutrition hypothermia frostbite bit of gangrene but mawson was the sole
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survivor of that expedition and many people had asked you know what is it that happened to the second
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man and did mawson need to eat the the second guy in order to make it and so i decided to do that trip
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the same way as mawson with the same starvation calories he had to see what happened i just traveled
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with an increasingly nervous russian guy we started from the point at which the first man died and
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the russian guy and i john basically tried to trek back to base the same distance as mawson on the same
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food that he said he had without the need to eat him and i made it but i lost i lost over 70 pounds
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in weight and fell over the finish line but i'm pretty much convinced that the thing that killed the
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second guy was eating the dog livers on that original expedition and he got vitaminosis that's what
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killed him and uh that it could be done without the need to eat the second man so um the prize was to
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be asked to do shackleton's journey what's vitaminosis what is that that's when you uh things like the
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livers of arctic animals contain toxic levels of vitamin a and humans just cannot metabolize that so
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if you eat the awful of those animals whether it's a polar bear or a fox or a dog or a reindeer you are
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poisoning yourself they didn't realize that back in 1913 but that's what was happening so you mentioned
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you did some other expeditions the modern way what were some of those expeditions you've done in
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antarctica well look i've been to antarctica 13 times i bid to be the first person across antarctica
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one side to the other on foot unsupported i got about 2 000 kilometers on that journey it was a pretty
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brutal brutal trip the thing that prevented me doing the total crossing was a fuel leak into my
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food about three quarters of the way through the journey but i did get the record for the longest
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journey at the time i got to the pole in 47 days and then out the other side i've also been down and
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made a vr film called thin ice which is all about showing the amount of change that's happening in
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antarctica that required getting to some pretty remote places then of course there's the mawson
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expedition there's the research for the mawson expedition then there's shackleton and the
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research for that and um i've been to the high arctic five times so look i i spend a lot of time
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down there when you do these expeditions whether it's a modern one or a recreation what's the hardest
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part is it the cold is it the long distance you have to walk the solitude what do you what do you
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what's been your experience uh look on any given day the difficulty changes i mean sure you can have
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extreme extreme weather you can have monotony you can have danger if you fall in crevasses which
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has happened before um i think it's the relentlessness of the place that really does you in i think the
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key thing with successful expeditions is just having your own internal frame your own internal
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kind of way you're going to conduct yourself because you've got a place with 24 hour light if you go in
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the summer you've got an endless white horizon you have to impose your own kind of structure on
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on things and just agree to do what you set out to do otherwise you can kind of get lost in the
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enormity of the place so i think it's the relentlessness you know you can't stop or you get
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cold the only time you can stop is really when you get in the tent at the end of the day but even that
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has to be done as quickly as possible because you're 10 000 feet up on the polar plateau and it's
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minus 40 degrees so you've got to move fast so i think it's that relentlessness well let's talk about
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shackleton's famous adventure when did shackleton make what became his most famous antarctic trip
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well shackleton had done uh he'd been south with scott of course on his expedition in 1903-05 and he
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was invalided home actually from that he then went a second time on the 1907-09 nimrod expedition and he
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almost made it to the south pole so this was actually his third expedition the one that he's
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he's really renowned for was the third expedition and he went down on the eve of the first world war
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in 1914 and the goal was to cross antarctica from one side to the other because of course
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scott had made it to the pole sadly didn't make it back he and his team of four
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died amundsen the norwegian of course made it in and out with no problem they were just
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slaughtering and consuming their dogs and feeding the weakest dogs to the strongest in order to make
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it but they did a very good job so shackleton thought to do one better than what scott and
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amundsen had done he would go all the way across that was the basic plan and he he left literally as
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first world war was breaking out okay when did things start going awry for the trip well i mean i think
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things went awry almost from the outset i mean they left the uk he wrote to churchill who was head of the
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admiralty and said look give me the word and i'll give over the whole the ship the expedition
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resources the men to the war effort and churchill just said proceed it was a one-word response
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and things went wrong almost immediately they got down to antarctic waters they reached south georgia
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on the way down which is an island at 54 degrees south middle of the atlantic at the bottom basically
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and they got down there and they realized that when they spoke to the whalers who were there
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they said look the ice is so thick this year you're never going to make it to antarctica but
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unfortunately of course they had no choice but to keep going and and they did and of course encountered
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the pack ice and the ship ground to a halt about 40 miles short of the antarctic coastline where it
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remained until the pressure of the ice crushed the hull and the ship sank so look it started going wrong
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from that moment how long did it take for the ship to sink after it got packed in ice well they were
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stuck uh on the ship for 10 months and they were then once the ship had sunk they lived on the pack
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ice for a further five months so they had you know a year and three months either in the stricken ship
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or on the pack ice so that takes you through by that stage to 1916 unbelievably you know they were they
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were at 1916 and when the pack ice broke up after they made camp on it they paddled for five days to
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reach this island called elephant island there everybody remained he left 22 of his men there
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under two of the upturned rowboats that they were in and he headed off in april 16 to do this crazy
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journey across the southern ocean to try and raise the alarm and rescue the guys he'd left behind
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okay so give us an idea what did that journey look like so they dropped them off at elephant island
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where did he go after that well like i say the ice broke up they paddled for five days in three rowboats
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they left two there with 22 men and then shackleton and the five strongest got in the most seaworthy of
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the boats they took plants off the other two and made a kind of deck on the one they were going to
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take the james cared and they headed off across the southern ocean the nearest inhabited place that you
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could reach was this island south georgia where they visited on the way down there there were
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whaling stations the problem was it was 800 nautical miles away across the roughest ocean in
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the world and they only had a sextant to measure the angle to the sun or a star if they could see
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them and you know you miss the island either because you can't find it or you sink in them on
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the way up there obviously that's bad but if you miss it there's no way you can turn around and have
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another go because the winds and currents that have pushed you north from antarctica towards south
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georgia won't allow you to sail back to have a second go so they had to get the trajectory right
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first time across this vastness of the southern ocean with mountainous seas and they experienced
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two storms and a hurricane on the way up there almost capsizing on multiple occasions before they
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made it and then they make it and then they had go on a hike after that well yeah that's right i mean
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they arrived from the south and they celebrated because they found south georgia but of course they
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arrived on the wrong side really they arrived on the southern side the southwestern side of the
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island and all the whaling stations where the people were were on the northern side so they
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couldn't sail around because if you try and hug the coastline the same winds and currents that have
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pushed you north will just push your little rowboat onto the rocks and and you've got to understand that
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south georgia is mountains 10 000 feet high really really jagged angular peaks like the alps you know
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coming straight out of the ocean so the only thing for it was to climb through the uncharted interior
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and of course they had no equipment they had no climbing ability they had no tent so it meant they
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couldn't stop they had to keep moving they had pieces of congealed animal fat for their sustenance
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from the seals they killed on the ice and they pulled the nails out of their packing cases and
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pushed them back through the soles of their boots for grip because they didn't have any crampons so
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it was a pretty serious undertaking to attempt this it was desperation but they had no choice
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how long did the hike take to get to the whaling station when shackledon got to south georgia they
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had the worst weather south georgia can throw at you so they were actually stuck on the beach where
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they landed for a further four or five days at which point shackledon realized three of the
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guys he was with were just in such poor shape they weren't going anywhere so he was already reduced to
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him and two others to try and make the crossing and the crossing then took 96 hours sorry in their
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case 36 me it took 96 36 hours of constant movement with no ability to rest for more than a few minutes
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at a time or you would freeze they had no shelter so by the time they reached the whaling station
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they've been out there for a long time and then once he got to the whaling station shackleton immediately
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started planning a rescue mission to get his men that he left on elephant island and when the ship
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finally got there this was almost two years after the endurance got stuck in the ice and all 22 of
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his men were still alive and the end result was shackleton saved his entire crew i mean no one died
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correct yeah that's right i mean you know he is really the almost the entire opposite of of what
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happened to scott scott died along with all his men very heroically in his bid to reach the south
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pole and shackleton equally heroically but for different reasons saved everybody on his failed
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attempt to cross antarctica from one side to the other he brought everybody home all 27 men and they
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got back in 1917 just in time to participate in the final years of the first world war so what was
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shackleton like as a leader what made him different from scott and the other antarctic explorers that
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allowed him to despite all the odds carry out successfully this rescue mission well shackleton was a people
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person really he was an outsider he was anglo-irish which has meant that as far as the irish were
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concerned he was a bit too english and the english regard him as sort of a bit too irish and so he
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didn't really sit comfortably in either camp he was merchant navy rather than scott who was royal navy
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so he couldn't just rely on commanding people to do things like you can in the royal navy you could
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back then you know you an officer issued an instruction you had to do it even if you didn't agree
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with it whereas merchant navy you know you had to really be liked by people or they wouldn't do
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things for you and he had a lot of female influences in his life as a young man and that maybe made him
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a bit more emotionally intelligent than the equivalent male of that period would have been so all in all
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it basically made him the kind of person who was more compassionate he was a tough guy but he was
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compassionate and he understood how to get the best out of people and it was all about putting
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yourself in their shoes and seeing things from their perspective and that allowed him to target
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the way he spoke to people to get the best out of people and the other thing that stood out to me
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as you wrote this book and carried out your own expedition you also talk about how shackled and he just had
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this unwavering optimism no matter the odds he's like oh we're gonna be fine like he was very intentional
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about it yeah you know he said optimism is true moral courage and he just had that fundamental
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optimistic outlook on life maybe it was his uh his irish genes maybe it was his upbringing maybe it was
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just who he was as a person but yeah absolutely he just had that incredible what we would now call
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growth mindset where if a problem came your way he just looked at it as an opportunity to uh prove
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himself and to overcome it and he rose to every every challenge problems are just things to overcome
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after all i think he said and he just he just seemed to enjoy it it was all part of the game and part of
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the test uh genuinely philosophical uh outlook on life okay so you get this idea to replicate
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shackleton's journey and we're going to talk about the lengths you went to to make sure you got it as close
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as possible so you tried to make the same type of boat the same type of clothing the same type of gear
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that these guys would be using the same sorts of rations any expedition to the antarctic is a huge
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undertaking there's so many moving parts there's layers upon layers of bureaucracy that you have to
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go through just to make a trip happen when you set your eyes on this goal to recreate shackleton's
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journey what was the first thing you had to work on well the first thing to do was to decide how we
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were going to do this were we going to do it absolutely true to the way he did it and once
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we decided we were that kind of made a lot of things in some respects easier because you just
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decided you were going to use a keelless rowboat you just decided you were going to use non-waterproof
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clothing you just decided you weren't going to use you know gps you were going to use a sextant
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which meant learning how to traditionally navigate using one so we could make the same kind of mistakes
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they made because essentially we were copying copying them so i think you know once you've made
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that decision in some respects yes it makes life a hell of a lot more unpleasant for you
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but it makes the thinking bit a little bit easier because on expeditions you're always trying to give
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yourself a bit of an angle and increase your chances of success but this time around we were just trying
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to you know copy what he had and and and let the cards fall as they may you know so i'm not saying it
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was easy quite the opposite you've got to rebuild all the boat and the equipment and learn traditional
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ways of doing things but at least you're just copying what he did the thing that stood out to
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me when you're building the boat the hardest part was all the customs and the dealing with different
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countries laws on imports and exports and there were a few close calls where the boat almost didn't
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make it to where it needed to get to to launch this mission yeah look i mean it was almost five years of
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pretty torturous planning and stress to make it a reality which is i guess why no one had done it
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since shackleton you know you and and you're right i mean the boat almost didn't make it on many
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occasions i mean there are all sorts of issues with funding for a start but and then you've got to find
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the expertise to do it but i was leaving to go to france and i was getting on the uh there's a
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the train tunnel that links to the uk and france and i was just about to put my car on that and go
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into zero phone reception and i got a call saying the boat is on a bigger ship about to do the same
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crossing as me but on the surface and the paperwork is not in order and you know i had to make frantic calls
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to australia to get custom information and ownership details across to the port authorities
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and i had about you know two minutes to do it before my train left and i i was plunged into half
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an hour of no phone reception if had i not made that the boat wouldn't have got across to france we
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wouldn't have made the ship that my little boat was going to piggyback on to go down to antarctica and
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there wouldn't have been an expedition and this sort of stuff was happening all the way through
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the whole process when when the boat finally got down to antarctica ahead of us it was traveling
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on a bigger ship and the bigger ship couldn't get into the base that i'd spent two years lining up as
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the place that i would drop this boat off on at because the pack ice had moved in and again within
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24 hours i had to come up with an alternative plan even though the previous plan had taken me two years
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to arrange so yeah look it wasn't without its stresses you mentioned funding how much did funding the
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trip take up your time and bandwidth oh look funding always took up a lot of time but i mean you look
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back at the heroic era and frankly nothing was different back then either i mean um even amundsen
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who's regarded as being this kind of morally upstanding norwegian who wouldn't ever do anything
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wrong i mean he left owing money and just thought you've just got to go and do the expedition and we'll
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make money if we're successful and it was the same for shackleton and uh the same for many of them
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frankly and it was you know to an extent the same for us i mean we obviously couldn't leave
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owing money but i certainly went with a lot of debt and you know we were lucky we had backers like
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discovery channel and pbs as the broadcast partners but a lot of their funding of course went into the
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making of the film we made not the funding of the expedition so um yeah look it took me years to
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raise the funds to make it a reality i just tried to take a leaf out of shackleton's playbook and uh
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and look at these things as problems to be overcome yeah that i like that idea that they're just problems
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to overcome and i love this the lessons that you can learn from shackleton or even you trying to plan
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this trip maybe people aren't listening to this show aren't going to be planning a trip to the
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antarctic but we've all got these big projects that we have to do maybe we're like renovating our house
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and same sort of thing you're going to have these red tape obstacles you're going to run out of money
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plans that you had they're going to fall through you just have to not stress out about it too much
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and just see them as problems to overcome we're going to take a quick break for your words from our
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sponsors and now back to the show so planning the trip going through the bureaucracy funding the trip
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that consumed a lot of your time but then you had to start recruiting for this trip how did you
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recruit for your trip and then did you get any lessons from shackleton on how to recruit
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shackleton ran an advert that may or may not have been real certainly he said it whether it appeared as
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an advert i'm not sure but it said men wanted for hazardous journey months of bitter cold darkness
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low wages honor and recognition in case of success safe return doubtful and he got about 3 000
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applicants for the 27 places now i thought about running the same advert i didn't in the end the
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word got round we were doing what we were doing and there were so many people who were interested that
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we were we had about 300 applicants for the five places on board on board the boat we weren't going
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to sink a perfectly good uh square rigger down in antarctica and leave 22 people on elephant island we
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were just going to get in the keelless rowboat the james cared and do the the rescue mission followed by
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the climbing and i had about 300 applicants but i think what was so clever about what shackleton said
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is the framing the way he put it he basically said look if you're interested in a good time
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and coming and meeting new people and traveling to interesting places perhaps don't apply but if
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you're interested in doing something at the limits of your own personal endurance then maybe this is for
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you because you're going to discover new things about yourself that will make you far
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life far richer maybe not in monetary terms but in spiritual terms then uh then please sign here and
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i think it appealed to people they thought yeah i'm up for that let's see what happens what sort of
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individuals were you looking for for your trip well i mean at that very basic level you're looking for
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five people to accompany you because there's six of us in total you need people who can sail
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or climb or film or preferably a combination of all of those things so the team were two real gun
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sailors nick bub paul larson ed wardle who's an everest mountaineer who's also the former free
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diving champion of the uk so a single breath deep as you can go he got down to almost 300 feet
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barry gray who's my climbing partner who's former head of outdoor survival for the uk armed forces
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and seb coulthard who is a royal navy guy very good at technical stuff so he he really project
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managed the construction of the boat so you need all of those skills climbing boat building filming
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sailing and navigating but you also need more than that you need what malcolm glabwell calls
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divergent intelligence so you've got you need people who have got the capacity to think laterally
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be positive in difficult situations and always be focused on getting a positive outcome
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so you need problem solving ability as well as the technical skills so you've mentioned some of the
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period equipment and gear that you brought for your expedition you used a sextant the clothing you used
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was just it was basically cotton clothing that you did you like waterproof it with wax did you do any
00:24:15.160
type of waterproofing on this stuff yeah they they waterproof because i mean you know you've got to
00:24:20.200
remember that antarctica is the driest windiest highest coldest continent in the world but the emphasis
00:24:24.860
on the driest is that some places there's been no no rainfall or snowfall for 200 000 years you know
00:24:30.900
it's very very dry you're not going to get you're not expecting to get rained on or snowed on really
00:24:35.520
so their clothing was breathable and windproof and so it was just tightly woven cotton they were never
00:24:43.020
intending to do an open boat journey in that clothing um so they used rendered down fat from seals
00:24:49.580
to sort of basically try and waterproof their clothing and we used a kind of an equivalent form
00:24:56.720
of just organic grease really so no animals were killed in the making of the film but we did use
00:25:03.020
kind of grease we just wiped it on with our hands and frankly after a couple of days it had washed off
00:25:07.960
anyway and the clothing just wasn't waterproof but that's what we did so food the original expedition
00:25:13.240
they killed some seals along the way you can't do that today so what did you all do for food to
00:25:18.660
get as close to the food that they ate as possible yeah we we we were really really very clinical about
00:25:25.900
the way we went about working out the food because you got protein fat and carbs and we really tried to
00:25:32.240
get exactly the same proportions of those we remade the pemmican pemmican is the kind of sledging ration of
00:25:38.560
the heroic era which is basically very very high fat content food we made pemmican exactly the same
00:25:47.700
recipe as them we took the equivalent meat that they would have got from the seals they ate in the
00:25:54.380
form of we took kangaroo jerky which is very very lean and we we worked out that it was exactly the
00:26:01.560
same sort of fat content as the non-fat meat of the seals they consumed and then we made up the rest of
00:26:08.760
the fat load with more of the pemmican which essentially is just congealed lard anyway so we took exactly the
00:26:14.940
same stuff as they had and we had the nougat and the nuts and the whiskey we took exactly the same as
00:26:20.420
they had we were able to look at their rations very carefully and and recreate them how many calories a
00:26:25.700
day did you get for each man well i mean you know bear in mind even though their food was high fat and
00:26:32.220
had lots of energy in it they actually didn't have much of it because of course they'd spent 10 months
00:26:36.060
on the ship eating most of the food and then five months on the pack ice once the ship sank
00:26:40.680
before they did their five days to elephant island and and so they were using food up all the way
00:26:46.920
through so by the time they got to elephant island before they embarked on this journey they didn't
00:26:51.120
have much left so we were only on about two two and a half thousand calories a day which is no more
00:26:56.280
than you would have back home basically kind of ration that a a fit male would probably consume
00:27:03.360
back home and it's not really enough for the extreme cold you experience and and of course you're
00:27:09.860
getting wet the whole time so your body is working very hard to keep warm and burning burning lots of
00:27:14.820
calories so we probably needed 5 000 but we were only eating about two two and a half did you lose a lot
00:27:19.480
of weight yeah i lost weight not as much as on the mawson expedition where i lost 70 pounds i probably
00:27:24.880
lost about 35 pounds on this trip because you've just got the stress of it all you got the the ever
00:27:31.280
present cold we had one good day when the weather was i wouldn't call it warm but it wasn't cold
00:27:36.520
it was um you know the sun actually came out but we got to south georgia we had five days of
00:27:42.160
you know 100 120 mile an hour catabolic winds you know and then crossing the mountains itself is a cold
00:27:50.320
unpleasant exercise so yeah you know you're you're burning through the calories so let's talk about the
00:27:57.440
trip itself so it starts off on the boat you guys create a replica of the boat that shackleton and
00:28:03.080
his crew used you uh named yours the alexandra shackleton after the granddaughter of shackleton
00:28:08.520
and the patron of your trip what was life like on that boat and like how much space did you have
00:28:14.500
i mean even like things like going to the bathroom what was that like well look i mean everything is
00:28:18.920
everything's challenging i mean you're living in the space the size of a queen size double bed
00:28:23.360
for six men basically so you're there's no lying down you're sitting on top of rocks shackleton took
00:28:30.640
a ton of rocks off the beach at elephant island to try and weigh the boat down and stop it tipping
00:28:34.780
upside down in big c in the absence of having a keel the vertical that sticks out of the bottom of the
00:28:40.520
boat to stop capsize happening so you're sitting on rocks and camera batteries to the equivalent weight
00:28:45.200
as what he had and you're sharing two steadily decomposing reindeer skin sleeping bags that
00:28:54.380
people have been sick into and you know you've got five of you just sitting there waiting for the guy
00:29:00.120
who's last in line to you know go up on deck and try and steer the boat at which point the guy who's up
00:29:07.460
there on the helm comes down and everybody moves around one if you know what i mean toilet was just done
00:29:12.160
in a bucket right kind of more or less in your face between one another and you've got about
00:29:18.640
half an inch of of large planks separating you from the zero degrees celsius seawater of
00:29:24.980
the southern ocean and it's rough and noisy and dark and basically extremely unpleasant so sometimes
00:29:32.020
as terrible as it was to have to be on the helm trying to steer the boat particularly at night
00:29:37.340
with waves crashing over you with frozen you're frozen solid you sometimes look forward to the
00:29:43.540
prospect of that rather than being stuck down below in a tiny cramped seated position you know sitting on
00:29:50.080
top of the rocks so look it was uh you know not much fun yeah was there a moment during that the boat
00:29:56.040
trip where you thought yeah we're not going to make it we're not to abandon this trip yeah you know there
00:30:02.420
are always those moments the question is what do you do about them you know to say that you don't
00:30:07.900
have that feeling you know pop up into your mind on multiple occasions during trips like this would
00:30:15.000
be lying i mean you do have those feelings but we never seriously thought about stopping but we did
00:30:19.940
have near capsized situations at sea and very very big sea state we did find ourselves approaching south
00:30:26.500
georgia going pretty quickly because we had massive seas pushing us onto south georgia and you've got a
00:30:33.480
limited ability to steer and you've got boiling cauldrons of rocks just below the surface you've
00:30:38.080
got these vertical cliffs that go straight up into five six thousand foot high peaks even at the coast
00:30:43.880
you know massive intimidating place to try and land a keel-less rowboat basically in big seas and then you
00:30:51.400
know crossing the mountains of south georgia we have multiple crevasse falls so and no equipment
00:30:56.100
really to you know get somebody out if one fell in and was injured so yeah there were many occasions
00:31:02.120
where i thought this could be bad if we don't get it right but luckily we prevailed so how long did it
00:31:08.340
take you to get from elephant island to land it was two weeks at sea followed by yeah five days when we
00:31:17.020
got there pinned down by very bad weather and how long did it take shackleton well he in fact took 17 days
00:31:23.120
it took a few more days than us but one of the reasons being they uh they almost made it and then
00:31:27.740
a hurricane blew them offshore they were tantalizingly close and they got pushed offshore
00:31:32.300
and they had to wait till the sort of prevailing seas came back to allow them to get pushed back onto
00:31:38.640
shore again so they were lucky they didn't get pushed out to sea and get pushed past south georgia
00:31:43.860
or as i say they would never have been able to sail up wind to reach it again they were lucky they just
00:31:48.820
got pushed back in the direction they just come from okay so two weeks on board a boat where you
00:31:55.380
have the space that's about the size of a queen size bed that's really cramped that's pretty tight
00:32:01.160
you know being around that many people did you guys have any personality clashes while you're on the boat
00:32:05.900
and if so like how did you manage that yes i mean there were the inevitable things but what i would say is
00:32:12.000
there are a good bunch of guys we'd had many of those disagreements before we ever got on the boat
00:32:15.820
you know so i think the key thing with team dynamics on expeditions or in any walk of life
00:32:20.900
is that you've got to be honest with one another and so we had some pretty frank discussions and
00:32:25.340
disagreements before we ever got there so and and that makes your relationship strong enough
00:32:31.420
to withstand what comes with an expedition you know there's no point going down there everybody
00:32:35.740
being friendly and happy and avoiding disagreement for the sake of harmony because as soon as you get
00:32:41.280
down there you're going to find the pressure is on and things can fall apart so look we'd had plenty
00:32:46.760
of plenty of disagreements and arguments and things like that they're all constructive though and um
00:32:51.620
we were a pretty tight-knit group by the time we got there you know that's not to say you don't have
00:32:56.060
disagreements when you're on board i mean it's difficult when you've got someone's backside in
00:33:00.200
your face and you're you're cold and wet and hungry and you're feeling sick and you're worried about
00:33:05.420
whether the boat will manage the next the next big wave that's about to hit tempers get a bit frayed
00:33:11.380
all right so you get to land that's when you start having attrition that's when you have members
00:33:14.780
starting to drop out what caused the attrition basically it was people's feet because you're
00:33:19.940
standing in leather boots with woolen socks often in knee to thigh deep freezing seawater so
00:33:28.540
really for the most of the time on the boat you're not feeling your feet properly sometimes for an
00:33:34.360
extended period of time sometimes days and for some of the guys that meant frostbite and what
00:33:40.940
they call trench foot which is what the the soldiers used to get in the first world war in the trenches
00:33:45.380
you're just cold wet in a seated position in their case so you don't get shot in our case there was just
00:33:52.240
no space and your circulation goes in your feet and so three of the six guys were unable to do the
00:33:58.580
mountain crossing but what's interesting that attrition set you up so your trip your hike
00:34:04.060
it would mirror shackleton's a bit more correct it was really amazing when you think that when
00:34:10.340
shackleton got there two of his guys were in very poor shape and he left the third man to keep an eye
00:34:14.920
on those two he left them under the upturned boat on the beach that they arrived at and then he and
00:34:19.740
the two strongest did the crossing of the mountains but he did it with tom cream he was the tough guy on
00:34:24.740
their expedition and a guy called frank worsley he was the skipper and navigator and when we got there
00:34:30.680
we were intending to do the crossing as a team of six the idea was that the three sailors would put
00:34:36.600
on modern gear brought in by another small yacht and then they would have modern comms and they would
00:34:42.680
be our kind of backup and me baz and ed the three mountaineers would stay in the old gear and do the
00:34:50.380
crossing that's the way it was meant to be but with injury we ended up with me and baz baz being the
00:34:56.420
hard guy me being the expedition leader and we ended up with paul who was our navigator because
00:35:01.540
the other guy's feet were too bad and it was the same three as shackleton you know he did it together
00:35:07.260
with tom cream the tough guy and worsley the navigator we did it as the expedition leader the
00:35:11.920
tough guy and and and our navigator so it was wonderful actually after you got over the initial
00:35:17.200
shock of three guys dropping out you thought actually this is a positive thing because it's bringing
00:35:23.160
us closer to what shackleton went through so you didn't begin the hike right away you actually you're
00:35:27.760
on the like the shore for a little bit correct well we had the worst weather south georgia can throw at
00:35:32.220
you for five days so we just got pinned down we couldn't couldn't get away we at that stage did
00:35:37.260
have tents because we knew we couldn't turn our boat upside down like shackleton had done once he got
00:35:42.600
there because we knew our boat ultimately had to be towed out of south georgia and removed you can't
00:35:47.720
just abandon boats down in antarctica these days so we knew we were going to have to have to take it
00:35:53.300
out so we did concede and have some tents on the shore they got blown blown away but really really
00:35:59.840
in really bad shape we ended up hiding in a cave and getting driftwood and getting fires going in the
00:36:06.140
cave just to sustain ourselves from the weather we were experiencing it was it was pretty brutal
00:36:11.480
did shackleton have something similar where you he was camped out a bit before he started the hike
00:36:15.700
yeah shackleton also ended up in a situation where he had to wait it out for a few days
00:36:21.620
for him it was for slightly different reasons they'd been forced to um to stop off at what he
00:36:27.360
called cave cove which is a different spot in the same bay before he moved after a period of time there
00:36:34.340
they moved a bit closer to the head of the bay before they started their climb but you know the
00:36:39.260
amount of time that he had to wait at the amount of time we had to wait very similar again we didn't
00:36:43.980
try and make that similarity happen it just happened with the weather we were given so you said earlier
00:36:48.720
that south georgia has a lot of high jagged peaks what were the hiking conditions like south georgia
00:36:55.740
is like an alpine mountaineering exercise it's very very steep terrain i would say the climbing up is
00:37:02.960
actually not bad it's perfectly doable the difficult bit is the going down and there are two serious
00:37:09.020
descents you have to do if you follow exactly the footsteps he took the first is off the trident
00:37:15.660
mountains where you're on the high ground and you've got to kind of find a cool wall between
00:37:19.740
these mountains that stick up out of that ice cap and you've got to go down those to get to the lower
00:37:24.940
ground and that's about a 1500 foot descent down very very steep terrain so that's the first bit that's
00:37:32.820
tricky the second thing that's tricky is crossing through the glaciers where
00:37:36.380
crevassing is a major issue and you have to travel whether the weather is good or bad you've got to
00:37:41.840
keep moving and so we traveled even when we couldn't see where we were going and you know that means you
00:37:47.100
fall in crevasses you don't even see and the third thing is break wind ridge which is the final ridge
00:37:52.420
going down into the valley just before the whaling station that's about a thousand foot down climb and
00:37:57.740
that is the most dangerous bit of all certainly the steepest and if you follow shackleton's diary
00:38:03.140
that's what he did and so that's what we did and it was pretty challenging because if anybody falls
00:38:09.440
you just pull the other two guys off with you and you fall to your death so it was tricky and we were
00:38:16.440
very very pleased when we got to the whaling station i can tell you and so it took you guys 96 hours
00:38:21.640
correct it took 96 yeah i mean one of the reasons for that was we were actually joined also by a yacht that
00:38:27.960
had come in we had a beacon on our boat that showed this other yacht who weren't with us but could see
00:38:32.980
us in the southern ocean they could see when we were approaching south georgia and so they they too
00:38:38.140
made their way to south georgia and then it brought with it two camera guys who had a lot of mountaineering
00:38:45.200
experience and the idea was they would be in modern gear and they would accompany us to film what
00:38:49.980
happened on the mountain crossing um basically they decided they couldn't do the crossing the weather
00:38:58.220
was too extreme one guy had a kind of injury the other guy decided it wasn't for him too extreme
00:39:05.900
and so both of those guys were out so part of our 96 hours related to having to kind of stay with those
00:39:13.520
guys and try and make sure they got down safely in the end they had to make their own way down but we
00:39:19.000
still had to stick it out with them on the high ground for about 36 hours so that accounts for
00:39:23.820
36 hours but i'm not quite sure where the other day came from that it took us compared to shackleton
00:39:29.500
it's amazing the speed that he crossed that terrain yeah it seemed like the tv crew got on your nerves
00:39:36.040
quite a bit there were there seemed like there were necessary evil sometimes yeah yeah that's right
00:39:42.180
that's right i mean shackleton never had to put up with that sort of shit i said to myself excuse the
00:39:46.840
language i mean you know and it's true you know when he was there it was just him and the enormity
00:39:54.720
of the landscape through which he traveled and the pressure he felt to make sure that somebody made it
00:40:00.400
to raise the alarm to go back and rescue the guys he left in antarctica for us we were burdened by
00:40:05.940
the film guys you know for them it was a job really for us it was a vocation you know it was a calling
00:40:13.100
and that's the difference none of my guys got paid me included and we were there because of the love of
00:40:18.420
it whereas i think if you've got people who are there because they're doing a job as good as they
00:40:23.320
might be it makes their kind of decision matrix a little bit different to yours and that's what
00:40:28.760
happened did you suffer any injuries on the hike in the climb well i mean i've already already had
00:40:34.920
bad frostbite on my hand haven't lost any fingers but i certainly lost sensation permanent nerve damage
00:40:40.800
in those and same with my right foot and that same old injury flared up again but i wasn't about to tell
00:40:46.620
anybody because i just don't think it it really uh it really helps but no apart from that we made it
00:40:54.520
through unscathed uh lost weight had a few crevasse falls as i say more than a few crevasse falls
00:40:59.520
but luckily none of them were serious the title of the last chapter of the book comes from a line
00:41:04.360
from shackleton he said never for me the lowered banner never the last endeavor what did that line
00:41:11.920
mean to you after you completed this journey it meant that for me there was always another challenge
00:41:18.360
you know it's not in life as though you retire from something it was a calling for him it is for me
00:41:24.420
you know there's never going to be a last thing until it's the last thing and then it'll be beyond
00:41:29.940
your control to do anything about it you know there's always going to be something you're going
00:41:33.200
to take on and i've for me i i i guess i've remained consistent to that throughout my life i've got a lot
00:41:40.420
of energy i'm i can't imagine just stopping why would you for him there was always the next thing
00:41:47.100
and for in his case he went back down six years after the expedition that in many people's eyes
00:41:54.380
was his greatest victory yes he didn't make the crossing of antarctica but he did save everybody
00:41:58.940
and demonstrated this incredible leadership and heroism in the into the bargain and he went back
00:42:05.200
one more time and died of a heart attack back at the scene of his greatest victory back at south
00:42:09.320
georgia the night he arrived and so that was the final chapter for him but he was kind of he went down
00:42:14.820
fighting what have you been doing since this expedition oh look since the expedition i've
00:42:20.380
had a project called 25 zero which involves climbing all the mountains at the equator that
00:42:24.720
have a remnant glacier to highlight climate change and i i've got through 16 of them and then covid sort
00:42:30.460
of got in the way and i've been working on that i made a film called thin ice which is a vr experience
00:42:36.180
about shackleton design really for kids but more grown-up kids seem to like it than kids or at least
00:42:41.520
both like it i'm working on with the australian government on setting up marine protected areas
00:42:47.420
down in the southern ocean and we had a big success last year with macquarie island which is one of
00:42:52.920
australia's three sub-antarctic islands now has a big sanctuary of almost half a million square
00:42:58.420
kilometers around it lots of things i'm working on i've got a reforestation project i'm working on
00:43:03.860
called the fork tree project i continue to make films i continue to do trips and i continue to work
00:43:09.560
on the environment stuff and as far as i'm concerned they're kind of all interconnected
00:43:13.020
makes sense to me anyway so never the lowered banner for you never the lowered banner never
00:43:18.500
the last endeavor that's right well tim this has been a great conversation where can people go to
00:43:22.580
learn more about the book and your work so look i think the best place to go is probably by website
00:43:27.300
timjarvis.org they can go to thinicevr.com and they can go to theforktreeproject.com which is my
00:43:37.100
reforestation work and then of course there's social media is timjarvis am as in am like the
00:43:43.240
morning and that's on linkedin and instagram fantastic well tim jarvis thanks for your time
00:43:47.960
it's been a pleasure thank you bro it's been wonderful my guest today was tim jarvis he's
00:43:53.080
the author of the book chasing shackleton it's available on amazon.com you can find more information
00:43:57.300
about his work at his website timjarvis.org also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:44:01.760
slash shackleton where you find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic
00:44:05.120
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:44:16.860
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00:44:20.640
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00:44:41.400
reminding you to listen to aom podcast but put what you've heard into action